State budget talks stall, then restart

Albany — The emphasis should have been on the word "possible" when Gov. Eliot Spitzer and legislative leaders announced "areas of possible agreement" Tuesday.

Brendan Scott

Albany — The emphasis should have been on the word "possible" when Gov. Eliot Spitzer and legislative leaders announced "areas of possible agreement" Tuesday.

State budget talks — already in danger of dragging past the April 1 deadline — stalled for hours yesterday, as Spitzer & Co. huddled behind closed doors to rehash deals on how to spend billions on things like education, health care and tax relief.

Eventually, Albany's Gang of Six (expanded from the standard three of previous years to include minority leaders and the lieutenant governor) emerged to renew their earlier spending vows and promise an on-time budget.

In some ways, the last-minute power powwow was typical of what has been done for years in Albany. But the drama was escalated by Spitzer's campaign promise to avoid late budgets and closed-door government.

Legislators would now get only hours to read the tome-thick budget bills that they plan to vote on Saturday. They were briefed on the renewed deals last night.

"The time frame that this is happening in is obviously more compressed than we would like," Spitzer said, apologizing repeatedly for the number of closed-door meetings. "Our first obligations is to get an on-time budget."

Spitzer said he did not favor passing a "bare-bones" budget just to carry the state past the deadline.

He said some issues, such as his call to expand the state's bottle deposit law, would have to be put off.

The lengthy power powwow followed chaos in low-level talks — where spending figures that once seemed set in stone were changed by the leadership. That left some interested parties, like the health-care industry, wary of declaring the victory many thought they had won.

"This thing ain't done yet," said Neil Abitabilo, president of Northern Metropolitan Hospital Association, which represented 34 hospitals in the Hudson Valley. "Some of the items that we were concerned about seem to have been restored."

Sptizer agreed to restore $356 million of his $1.3 billion in cuts to the state share of Medicaid. That included rolling back $303 million of his proposed $560 million cut in state aid to hospitals and nursing homes.

He also agreed to let the .35 percent on hospital revenue — the so-called "sick tax" — expire with the current budget this Sunday.